ABSTRACT
As Jessie Redmon Fauset’s second novel, Plum Bun, approaches the neatly conventional dénouement of most sentimental fiction, its main character, Angela Murray, begins to admit her uncertainty regarding “‘[j]ust what is or is not ethical in this matter of colour.’”1 Although she had previously dismissed the difficulty of negotiating the gap between racial identity and color with a simple “when it seemed best to be coloured she would be coloured; when it was best to be white she would be that” (253), as the novel draws to a close, Angela’s “head ached with the futility of trying to find a solution to these interminable puzzles” (337). In addition to the gap between racial identity and color, then, Angela’s confusion reveals another disparity between the neatly wrapped forms of literary convention and the impossibility of reaching a satisfying solution in the complex tangle of race, gender and class that is Fauset’s central concern.2
